Kharge, Gandhis hard-sell INDIA bloc at CWC meet amid discordant notes

The two-day-long deliberations of the Congress Working Committee (CWC), which concluded in Hyderabad on Sunday (September 17) evening, saw Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and his predecessors, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi, stridently hard-sell the INDIA coalition to their party colleagues. Yet, while the CWC wholeheartedly welcomed the “continuing consolidation” of the 28-party Opposition bloc, there were clear signs, both within the party’s highest decision-making body and outside it, that a bumpy ride awaits the Congress and its allies as they try to electorally operationalise their ambitious alliance.

The first setback came on Saturday, hours before the CWC began its discussions, when Kamal Nath, the Congress’s Madhya Pradesh unit chief, told reporters in the state capital that the joint rally of the INDIA coalition that was scheduled to be held in Bhopal early next month stood cancelled.

While Nath offered no reason for the cancellation, party leaders gathered in Hyderabad for the CWC meet, including Congress communications department chief Jairam Ramesh, told reporters that they were not aware of the development.

No information on cancellation

At least three members of the INDIA coordination committee, which had on September 14 agreed to hold the coalition’s first joint rally in Bhopal, told The Federal that they, too, were not aware of the rally being cancelled or rescheduled.

“As far as I am aware, none of the 12 members who attended the coordination committee meeting on September 14 where we decided on the Bhopal rally have been consulted or informed about the cancellation. I will ask (KC) Venugopal ji (Congress’s organisational general secretary and INDIA coordination committee member) if this is true and if the rally has indeed been cancelled. Then we need to be told why this decision was taken without consulting other members of the committee,” Javed Ali Khan, the Samajwadi Party nominee on the coordination committee told The Federal.

Another coordination committee member, who did not wish to be named, said the decision to cancel the rally seems to have been “taken unilaterally by Kamal Nath, who is not even a member of the committee” and “if this is true, it sends a wrong message... we announced the rally just a week back and we were in the process of finalising a date; it is not good to announce our first rally and then say it has been cancelled without giving any reasonable justification”.

Tiff with allies

A day later, even as Kharge and the Gandhis were still talking up the INDIA coalition at the second sitting of the CWC, their colleagues from Punjab and Delhi, including Partap Singh Bajwa and Ajay Maken, listed a litany of reasons for resisting any alliance with the AAP. Bajwa, said sources, went to the extent of asserting that any seat-sharing pact with the AAP in Punjab would “wipe out” the Congress in the state, while Maken, a known Kejriwal-baiter, pointed out that despite being part of the INDIA bloc and having previously assured allies of putting its expansion plans on hold till the Lok Sabha polls, the AAP was fielding candidates in MP, Chhattisgarh, and Rajasthan “to help the BJP and damage us”.

Stirring up more discontent was Nath’s colleague from MP, party veteran Digvijaya Singh, who, along with some other members, demanded that the Congress must unequivocally condemn the controversial “eradicate Sanatana Dharma” remark made by ally DMK’s Udhayanidhi Stalin.

A self-proclaimed follower of Sanatana Dharma, Singh is learnt to have told the party leadership that by merely stating that the Congress does not share Udhayanidhi’s views, the Congress was allowing the BJP to revive the anti-Hindu charge against the party. Sources said Singh, backed by Chhattisgarh chief minister Bhupesh Baghel, asserted that the Congress refusal to strongly condemn Udhayanidhi’s comments will severely dent the party’s electoral prospects in the Hindi-heartland states where religious polarisation has worked like a charm for the BJP.

Nath’s version of Hindutva

Though former Congress chief Rahul Gandhi cautioned party leaders against falling into the traps laid by the BJP, ostensibly on issues such as the Sanatana Dharma row, CWC members from the poll-bound states of Rajasthan, MP, and Chhattisgarh remained concerned about the electoral price they would be forced to pay for a comment made by the leader of an allied party who “is unmindful of the complications that his statement has created for us”, a CWC member told The Federal.

With the BJP already building up a row over Udhayanidhi’s remarks to brand all INDIA constituents as “anti-Hindu”, reportedly under direct instructions from Prime Minister Narendra Modi, some in the Congress, as well as among its allies, believe that Nath’s announcement about the Opposition bloc’s Bhopal rally being cancelled could be meant to isolate himself and his party from the Sanatana Dharma controversy.

“Nath has spent the last few years aggressively pushing his own version of Hindutva politics in MP in a bid to counter the BJP. With elections in MP just a month away and Nath hopeful of a Congress victory, it is possible that he didn’t want DMK leaders coming to Bhopal after this Sanatana controversy broke out. There are some leaders in the INDIA coalition who are also uncomfortable with the pro-Hindutva stance that Nath has adopted and sharing stage with him would have been politically damaging for some of us too,” a senior leader from one of the INDIA parties told The Federal. This leader, however, also added that “the Congress should have taken all allies into confidence before Nath made the announcement... we would have understood their compulsion but such arbitrary decisions are not a good look on the alliance”.

Incidentally, after Nath’s announcement, MP chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan, too, claimed that the INDIA rally was cancelled because the Opposition bloc feared a reprisal from the electorate because of Udhayanidhi’s comment. However, even two days after Nath made that declaration, the Congress is yet to offer either a confirmation about the rally being cancelled or an explanation for calling off what was being pegged as the INDIA bloc’s first show of strength.

The seat-sharing question

Sources said at Sunday’s CWC discussions, the Congress high command also faced a sort of pushback from several leaders over the INDIA coordination committee’s announcement of completing seat-sharing arrangements between allies “at the earliest”. With the dominant view in the CWC being that the Congress must try to prolong the seat-sharing talks till assembly polls in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, MP and Mizoram are concluded, Kharge and other senior CWC members such as Ambika Soni had to assertively intervene and suggest that the CWC was “not the place” for discussing seat-sharing arrangements and that “any final decision on the matter will only be taken after detailed consultations with state leaders”.

The Federal had reported earlier that an influential section within the party wants the seat-sharing talks to be concluded only after results for the five Assembly polls due in October-November are declared. The party is hopeful of victory in most of these states and these leaders feel that such poll triumphs would grant the Congress better bargaining power in seat-sharing talks with equally demanding allies.

Unlike the slew of resolutions on a wide array of subjects, including the INDIA coalition, which were adopted by the CWC after Day 1 of its Hyderabad meet, the resolutions passed on Sunday were brief; limited to the party’s electoral ambitions for the ensuing Assembly and Lok Sabha polls and made no mention of the INDIA bloc.

The resolution adopted on Sunday simply expressed the extended CWC’s confidence of winning a “decisive mandate from the people of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh, Mizoram, Rajasthan, and Telangana” and said that the party was also “fully ready” for Lok Sabha polls due in April-May 2024. The resolution stated that the CWC “is confident that the people of our country are wanting change” and that the Congress will “fulfil their expectations of law and order, freedom, social and economic justice, equality and equity”.